INTRODUCTION

OUR MASTER AND HIS MESSAGE

In the four volumes (Now in nine volumes — Ed.) of the works
of the Swami Vivekananda which are to compose the present edition, we
have what is not only a gospel to the world at large, but also to its
own children, the Charter of the Hindu Faith. What Hinduism needed,
amidst the general disintegration of the modern era, was a rock where
she could lie at anchor, an authoritative utterance in which she might
recognise her self. And this was given to her, in these words and
writings of the Swami Vivekananda.

For the first time in history, as has been said elsewhere,
Hinduism itself forms here the subject of generalisation of a Hindu
mind of the highest order. For ages to come the Hindu man who would
verify, the Hindu mother who would teach her children, what was the
faith of their ancestors will turn to the pages of these books for
assurance and light. Long after the English language has disappeared
from India, the gift that has here been made, through that language, to
the world, will remain and bear its fruit in East and West alike. What
Hinduism had needed, was the organising and consolidating of its own
idea. What the world had needed was a faith that had no fear of truth.
Both these are found here. Nor could any greater proof have been given
of the eternal vigour of the San‚tana Dharma, of the fact that India is
as great in the present as ever in the past, than this rise of the
individual who, at the critical moment, gathers up and voices the
communal consciousness.

That India should have found her own need satisfied only in
carrying to the humanity outside her borders the
bread of life is what might have been foreseen. Nor did it happen on
this occasion for the first time. It was once before in sending out to
the sister lands the message of a nation-making faith that India learnt
as a whole to understand the greatness of her own thought — a
self-unification that gave birth to modern Hinduism itself. Never may
we allow it to be forgotten that on Indian soil first was heard the
command from a Teacher to His disciples: "Go ye out into all the world,
and preach the Gospel to every creature!" It is the same thought, the
same impulse of love, taking to itself a new shape, that is uttered by
the lips of the Swami Vivekananda, when to a great gathering in the
West he says: "If one religion true, then all the others also
must be true. Thus the Hindu faith is yours as much as mine."
And again, in amplification of the same idea: "We Hindus do not merely
tolerate, we unite ourselves with every religion, praying in the mosque
of the Mohammedan, worshipping before the fire of the Zoroastrian, and
kneeling to the cross of the Christian. We know that all religions
alike, from the lowest fetishism to the highest absolutism, are but so
many attempts of the human soul to grasp and realise the Infinite. So
we gather all these flowers, and, binding them together with the cord
of love, make them into a wonderful bouquet of worship." To the heart
of this speaker, none was foreign or alien. For him, there existed only
Humanity and Truth.

Of the Swami's address before the Parliament of Religions, it
may be said that when he began to speak it was of "the religious ideas
of the Hindus", but when he ended, Hinduism had been created. The
moment was ripe with this potentiality. The vast audience that faced
him represented exclusively the occidental mind, but included some
development of all that in this was most distinctive. Every nation in
Europe has poured in its human contribution upon America, and notably
upon Chicago, where the Parliament was held. Much of the best, as well
as some of the worst, of modern
effort and struggle, is at all times to be met with, within the
frontiers of that Western Civic Queen, whose feet are upon the shores
of Lake Michigan, as she sits and broods, with the light of the North
in her eyes. There is very little in the modern consciousness, very
little inherited from the past of Europe, that does not hold some
outpost in the city of Chicago. And while the teeming life and eager
interests of that centre may seem to some of us for the present largely
a chaos, yet they are undoubtedly making for the revealing of some
noble and slow-wrought ideal of human unity, when the days of their
ripening shall be fully accomplished.

Such was the psychological area, such the sea of mind, young,
tumultuous, overflowing with its own energy and self-assurance, yet
inquisitive and alert withal, which confronted Vivekananda when he rose
to speak. Behind him, on the contrary, lay an ocean, calm with long
ages of spiritual development. Behind him lay a world that dated itself
from the Vedas, and remembered itself in the Upanishads, a world to
which Buddhism was almost modern; a world that was filled with
religious systems of faiths and creeds; a quiet land, steeped in the
sunlight of the tropics, the dust of whose roads had been trodden by
the feet of the saints for ages upon ages. Behind him, in short, lay
India, with her thousands of years of national development, in which
she had sounded many things, proved many things, and realised almost
all, save only her own perfect unanimity, from end to end of her great
expanse of time and space, as to certain fundamental and essential
truths, held by all her people in common.

These, then, were the two mind-floods, two immense rivers of
thought, as it were, Eastern and modern, of which the yellow-clad
wanderer on the platform of the Parliament of Religions formed for a
moment the point of confluence. The formulation of the common bases of
Hinduism was the inevitable result of the shock of their
contact, in a personality, so impersonal. For it was no experience of
his own that rose to the lips of the Swami Vivekananda there. He did
not even take advantage of the occasion to tell the story of his
Master. Instead of either of these, it was the religious consciousness
of India that spoke through him, the message of his whole people, as
determined by their whole past. And as he spoke, in the youth and
noonday of the West, a nation, sleeping in the shadows of the darkened
half of earth, on the far side of the Pacific, waited in spirit for the
words that would be borne on the dawn that was travelling towards them,
to reveal to them the secret of their own greatness and strength.

Others stood beside the Swami Vivekananda, on the same
platform as he, as apostles of particular creeds and churches. But it
was his glory that he came to preach a religion to which each of these
was, in his own words, "only a travelling, a coming up, of different
men, and women, through various conditions and circumstances to the
same goal". He stood there, as he declared, to tell of One who had said
of them all, not that one or another was true, in this or that respect,
or for this or that reason, but that "All these are threaded upon Me,
as pearls upon a string. Wherever thou seest extraordinary holiness and
extraordinary power, raising and purifying humanity, know thou that I
am there." To the Hindu, says Vivekananda, "Man is not travelling from
error to truth, but climbing up from truth to truth, from truth that is
lower to truth that is higher." This, and the teaching of Mukti — the
doctrine that "man is to become divine by realising the divine," that
religion is perfected in us only when it has led us to "Him who is the
one life in a universe of death, Him who is the constant basis of an
ever-changing world, that One who is the only soul, of which all souls
are but delusive manifestations" — may be taken as the two great
outstanding truths which, authenticated by the
longest and most complex experience in human history, India proclaimed
through him to the modern world of the West.

For India herself, the short address forms, as has been said,
a brief Charter of Enfranchisement. Hinduism in its wholeness the
speaker bases on the Vedas, but he spiritualises our conception of the
word, even while he utters it. To him, all that is true is Veda. "By
the Vedas," he says, "no books are meant. They mean the accumulated
treasury of spiritual laws discovered by different persons in different
times." Incidentally, he discloses his conception of the Sanatana
Dharma. "From the high spiritual flights of the Vedanta philosophy, of
which the latest discoveries of science seem like echoes, to the lowest
ideas of idolatry with its multifarious mythology, the agnosticism of
the Buddhists, and the atheism of the Jains, each and all have a place
in the Hindu's religion." To his mind, there could be no sect, no
school, no sincere religious experience of the Indian people — however
like an aberration it might seem to the individual — that might rightly
be excluded from the embrace of Hinduism. And of this Indian
Mother-Church, according to him, the distinctive doctrine is that of
the Ishta Devat‚, the right of each soul to choose its own path, and to
seek God in its own way. No army, then, carries the banner of so wide
an Empire as that of Hinduism, thus defined. For as her spiritual goal
is the finding of God, even so is her spiritual rule the perfect
freedom of every soul to be itself.

Yet would not this inclusion of all, this freedom of each, be
the glory of Hinduism that it is, were it not for her supreme call, of
sweetest promise: "Hear, ye children of immortal bliss! Even ye that
dwell in higher spheres! For I have found that Ancient One who is
beyond all darkness, all delusion. And knowing Him, ye also shall be
saved from death." Here is the word for the sake of
which all the rest exists and has existed. Here is the crowning
realisation, into which all others are resolvable. When, in his lecture
on "The Work Before Us," the Swami adjures all to aid him in the
building of a temple wherein every worshipper in the land can worship,
a temple whose shrine shall contain only the word Om, there are some of
us who catch in the utterance the glimpse of a still greater temple —
India herself, the Motherland, as she already exists — and see the
paths, not of the Indian churches alone, but of all Humanity,
converging there, at the foot of that sacred place wherein is set the
symbol that is no symbol, the name that is beyond all sound. It is to
this, and not away from it, that all the paths of all the worships and
all the religious systems lead. India is at one with the most puritan
faiths of the world in her declaration that progress is from seen to
unseen, from the many to the One, from the low to the high, from the
form to the formless, and never in the reverse direction. She differs
only in having a word of sympathy and promise for every sincere
conviction, wherever and whatever it may be, as constituting a step in
the great ascent.

The Swami Vivekananda would have been less than he was, had
anything in this Evangel of Hinduism been his own. Like the Krishna of
the Git‚, like Buddha, like Shankar‚ch‚rya, like every great teacher
that Indian thought has known, his sentences are laden with quotations
from the Vedas and Upanishads. He stands merely as the Revealer, the
Interpreter to India of the treasures that she herself possesses in
herself. The truths he preaches would have been as true, had he never
been born. Nay more, they would have been equally authentic. The
difference would have lain in their difficulty of access, in their want
of modern clearness and incisiveness of statement, and in their loss of
mutual coherence and unity. Had he not lived, texts that today will
carry the bread of life to thousands might have remained the obscure
disputes of scholars. He taught with authority, and not as one of the
Pandits. For he himself had plunged to the depths of the realisation
which he preached, and he came back like Ramanuja only to tell its
secrets to the pariah, the outcast, and the foreigner.

And yet this statement that his teaching holds nothing new is
not absolutely true. It must never be forgotten that it was the Swami
Vivekananda who, while proclaiming the sovereignty of the Advaita
Philosophy, as including that experience in which all is one, without a
second, also added to Hinduism the doctrine that Dvaita,
Vishisht‚dvaita, and Advaita are but three phases or stages in a single
development, of which the last-named constitutes the goal. This is part
and parcel of the still greater and more simple doctrine that the many
and the One are the same Reality, perceived by the mind at different
times and in different attitudes; or as Sri Ramakrishna expressed the
same thing, "God is both with form and without form. And He is that
which includes both form and formlessness."

It is this which adds its crowning significance to our
Master's life, for here he becomes the meeting-point, not only of East
and West, but also of past and future. If the many and the One be
indeed the same Reality, then it is not all modes of worship alone, but
equally all modes of work, all modes of struggle, all modes of
creation, which are paths of realisation. No distinction, henceforth,
between sacred and secular. To labour is to pray. To conquer is to
renounce. Life is itself religion. To have and to hold is as stern a
trust as to quit and to avoid.

This is the realisation which makes Vivekananda the great
preacher of Karma, not as divorced from, but as expressing Jn‚na and
Bhakti. To him, the workshop, the study, the farmyard, and the field
are as true and fit scenes for the meeting of God with man as the cell
of the monk or the door of the temple. To him, there is no
difference between service of man and worship of God, between manliness
and faith, between true righteousness and spirituality. All his words,
from one point of view, read as a commentary upon this central
conviction. "Art, science, and religion", he said once, "are but three
different ways of expressing a single truth. But in order to understand
this we must have the theory of Advaita."

The formative influence that went to the determining of his
vision may perhaps be regarded as threefold. There was, first, his
literary education, in Sanskrit and English. The contrast between the
two worlds thus opened to him carried with it a strong impression of
that particular experience which formed the theme of the Indian sacred
books. It was evident that this, if true at all, had not been stumbled
upon by Indian sages, as by some others, in a kind of accident. Rather
was it the subject-matter of a science, the object of a logical
analysis that shrank from no sacrifice which the pursuit of truth
demanded.

In his Master, Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, living and teaching in
the temple-garden at Dakshineshwar, the Swami Vivekananda — "Naren" as
he then was — found that verification of the ancient texts which his
heart and his reason had demanded. Here was the reality which the books
only brokenly described. Here was one to whom Sam‚dhi was a constant
mode of knowledge. Every hour saw the swing of the mind from the many
to the One. Every moment heard the utterance of wisdom gathered
superconsciously. Everyone about him caught the vision of the divine.
Upon the disciple came the desire for supreme knowledge "as if it had
been a fever". Yet he who was thus the living embodiment of the books
was so unconsciously, for he had read none of them! In his Guru,
Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, Vivekananda found the key to life.

Even now, however, the preparation for his own task was not
complete. He had yet to wander throughout
the length and breadth of India, from the Himalayas to Cape Comorin,
mixing with saints and scholars and simple souls alike, learning from
all, teaching to all, and living with all, seeing India as she was and
is, and so grasping in its comprehensiveness that vast whole, of which
his Master's life and personality had been a brief and intense epitome.

These, then — the Sh‚stras, the Guru, and the Mother≠land —
are the three notes that mingle themselves to form the music of the
works of Vivekananda. These are the treasure which it is his to offer.
These furnish him with the ingredients whereof he compounds the world's
heal-all of his spiritual bounty. These are the three lights burning
within that single lamp which India by his hand lighted and set up, for
the guidance of her own children and of the world in the few years of
work between September 19, 1893 and July 4, 1902. And some of us there
are, who, for the sake of that lighting, and of this record that he has
left behind him, bless the land that bore him and the hands of those
who sent him forth, and believe that not even yet has it been given to
us to understand the vastness and significance of the message that he
spoke.